In Defense of Jen Graves: The Wolverine Movie Sucks Like a Black Hole

Dear nerds,

A number of you have flooded the comments section of Jen Graves’ review of Wolverine with comments like:

I do wonder why Jonah or Paul weren’t sent to review this movie – they’d have the requisite background to make an educated and thorough review.

and

Read the damn comic or talk to someone who has before ripping apart details included for real fans.

Indeed, Paul and I are the resident nerds on staff and it’s perfectly reasonable to ask why Paul and I weren’t sent to review X-Men Origins: Wolverine’s Bad Hair Day. For my part, I refused to go. Someone showed me a copy of the bootleg after it was released online a few weeks back and was in no hurry to see it again. I don’t know why Paul didn’t go, but I’d guess he was probably in the midst of training for his big eat-off.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, it must be said that the Wolverine movie is in fact a giant steaming pile of poo, and I hated every single frame of it. Jen—who is shockingly well-versed in X-lore—totally nailed everything that’s wrong with this movie: “Wolverine brings the intelligence of the first two X-Men movies, which have been on a starvation diet since they switched directors for X-Men: The Last Stand, to a serious new level of emaciation.”

Indeed, Wolverine is a stupid, stupid movie. All glitz and gunfire with no subtext, humor or well-staged action. On top of that, Hugh Jackman seems detached and bored, the endless stream of “hey, it’s Gambit/Deadpool/Blob character cameos are needlessly distracting, the dialogue is atrocious and so on. It is a sloppy film and it’s baffling to me that studios can still get away with spending $130 million on movies that turns out to be such catastrophic messes.

If you go to one nerdy movie this weekend, make it Star Trek. Paul Constant says it’s “an adventurous, fun, and sexy movie that’s willing to laugh and let its audience in on the joke, too” and I call it “Trektacular!”